The Silent Observer
The young detective pulled her shoe out of the mud as she walked back to the edge of the crime scene, silently cursing her momentary bad luck. She looked out over the various collection of officers and detectives, the latter of which had just started to gather at the scene. This was only the fourth time the young detective could be considered part of the second group, and she thought her promotion had came with absolutely perfect timing. An unusually hard rainy season had hit London over the past month (even worse than it usually did), and for once the young detective, now being a detective, didn't have to deal with the hours of prep work spent surrounding the crime scene with yellow police tape and setting up giant tarps to keep important evidence from washing away.
One of the older inspectors, her mentor, approached her from across the scene, where a few cars had just pulled up. They were in the middle of a forest, several miles away from civilization, but luckily a small muddy road led almost directly to the edge of their barrier. Still inexperienced, the young detective had been assigned to her mentor to learn some of the more intricate parts of investigation beyond collecting evidence, taking pictures, and guarding the famous yellow barrier. This was only her fourth official crime as a detective (and only the second with an actual body, which currently laid on its side with two bullet wounds near its heart).
"What do we know about the victim so far?" Her mentor, Detective Sergeant Donovan, asked her. The young detective passed her a clipboard with the information they had managed to compile so far.
"His name is James Brown, according to his ID, but we don't know anything else about him yet other than his birthday: April 8th, 1974. Another detective's working on identifying him as we speak." The young detective nervously spouted off the important details of the case off the top of her head. "Oh, and he had twenty three thousand pounds in a lunchbox he was carrying".
DS Donovan nodded and watched as two more cars pulled up, only one of them a police car. The Detective Inspector and another more junior detective got out of the police car, while two normal looking lads got out of a cab, which pulled away quickly to avoid getting stuck in the mud.
The young detective didn't recognize either of the men, but they both walked past the crime scene barrier with no hesitation, and none of the other officers tried to stop them. One of the men, the taller of the two, sauntered in with a long black coat, while the other man, with short blonde hair and a grey jumper, followed close on his heels. The Detective Inspector stopped and talked to them as they approached the scene, and the young detective turned to her mentor.
"Who are they, and what do they have to do with the investigation?" She asked curiously. DS Donovan laughed for a while before responding. "Nothing, absolutely nothing." Once she had stifled her giggles, she continued. "You haven't met the freak and his friend yet because of your transfer, have you?"
The young detective shook her head no, having just transferred precincts with her recent promotion.
"The taller one, Holmes, calls himself a consulting detective. Comes sauntering in here and solves every crime scene in thirty minutes or less, or your money back guaranteed." She laughed again. "If you haven't met him yet, go say hello. Something tells me you'll be stuck working with him for a long time, so you may as well introduce yourself."
The young detective carefully maneuvered through the mud to reach the three men standing around the body. She could hear the tall curly haired one, Holmes, talking as she approached, rattling off a list of things about the victim that she had no idea how he knew.
"... 185 pounds, has a fetish for black coffee, recently returned from a trip to somewhere tropical, likely in South or Central America. Shot twice though the heart from a sniper approximately" he looked up towards a nearby towering pine "a hundred and fifty feet away. Near instant death." Holmes glanced up again as the young detective approached, but didn't give her a second glance as he continued his deductions. "Comes from a wealthy family. A very wealthy family. Likely one with a large business, based on his suit and shoes. But he wasn't killed for his money, which means something much bigger is going on here."
He got up, brushed off his hands, and turned to the Detective Inspector. "His identity?"
Detective Inspector Lestrade shook his head. "First run through didn't pull up anything. He must be using a fake passport and ID. Several James Browns in the system, but none of them match his description or approximate age."
Holmes glanced over to the shorter man, looking more thrilled by the minute. "Finally, John, after three weeks without an interesting case! I mean, it still only qualifies as moderately thrilling, maybe a five, but after nearly a month of only ones and twos, we have to take what we can get, right?"
The young detective, as she finally sees the consulting detective's face close up for the first time, has a moment of recollection. She recognizes Sherlock Holmes, who was famous in the news a while back for faking his death and then returning unscathed three years later. She offers her hand to the consulting detective, considerably in awe. "You must be Sherlock Holmes? The famous detective?"
Sherlock gave her a quick glance and nod, but didn't offer his hand. "Yes, that would obviously be me. You might not know, having only been transferred here recently, but you probably recognized my face from the news." He didn't ask the young detective her name, brushing her off and turning back to the man he called John, who was checking over the body for other wounds. The young detective hardly noticed the brush off, though, still amazed with his apparently impossible deductions. The Detective Inspector laughed at the look on her face. "That's the general reaction we get now-a-days from most of the new recruits."
DS Donovan came running up a few seconds later, though, with a stricken look on her face. "We got a match based on fingerprints. His real name is Daniel, Daniel Williams. The Daniel Williams."
The Detective Inspector looked shocked. "What's the second richest man in all of Britain doing out here in the middle of a forest, dead?"
"His family says he's been missing for three days, but they didn't want to release it to the news yet in case it would cause a panic and hurt their business. His daughter, when we contacted her just now, mentioned that one evening someone delivered him a packet of files, and he practically tore off into the night. No one's seen him since. His daughter also specifically mentioned that the files were marked red. "
The blonde man, John, looked surprised. "Files marked with red?"
Holmes nodded. "Government files, ones of the highest security status."
The Detective Inspector got a phone call and stepped off to the side. The young detective noticed that both Holmes and John had odd looks on their faces: Sherlock was deep in thought, while John looked seriously concerned.
DI Lestrade closed his phone and turned back to the two of them. "The government's concerned that something really serious is going on. Mycroft personally requested that you go in deep, Sherlock."
DS Donovan, who had minutes ago looked appalled by the pair of men, now appeared much more concerned. Sherlock straightened up, and John grabbed his arm.
"Mycroft personally? This must be serious for him to ask for my help in this way. Very serious." Sherlock said thoughtfully.
John looked stricken. "You sure about this? We can figure this out the normal way, if you don't want to do this. Go running about London like we always end up doing."
DI Lestrade nodded. "No one's forcing you, but this would speed up the investigation a lot. If the situation is as serious as I understand it to be, this could save a lot of lives."
Sherlock looked troubled for a second, but then silently nodded in agreement. "I'll be back soon, then, I guess."
Everyone jumped into motion. All of the officers who hadn't made detective yet quickly cleared off the scene, almost eerily quickly, like they had just been given a silent code to disperse. One of the other investigators (whom the young detective couldn't remember the name of to save her live) grabbed a chair from out of the trunk of one of the police cars, while DS Donovan grabbed a blanket and handed it to John. "For the cold" she said quietly, before stepping back to give Sherlock some space.
"What's going on?" The young detective piqued up, watching with interest as the detectives gathered around Sherlock and he kneeled down by the body. The Detective Inspector walked over to her and stood by her side. The chair was set down near Sherlock, and the detective nodded to John, who nodded to Sherlock. "See you on the other side, then?" John said, and Sherlock nodded back to him, a sad smile on his face.
Sherlock bent his head down and touched it to the head of one dead Daniel Williams. He left it there for a few seconds, and then all of a sudden, seized up and pulled away from the body, shaking. Two of the detectives pulled him up and sat him down in the chair, holding him in place as his shaking calmed and his eyes closed. John reached over and draped the blanket around his shoulders, checking to make sure he wasn't about to fall out of the chair.
"This is classified information, you understand?" The young detective nodded as the Detective Inspector continued. "Sherlock has a... gift, beyond what the public knows as his amazing powers of deduction and near perfect memory. I don't completely understand how it works, but the gist of it makes sense in the grand scheme of things. It explains how he developed his amazing powers of deduction and observation, it explains his incredible intelligence, and it certainly explains why he's so bored all the time, especially with people."
"Sherlock can live people's lives over, basically. Always from start to finish, every single moment of their existence, he can experience it all over again by touching heads with someone, whether they're dead or not." DI Lestrade glanced down at his watch and set the alarm on it for some unknown time. "It usually takes about an hour, how long he's stuck in there, for a person around our victim's age. We call it going in deep, because in the period of about the next hour, he'll experience the equivalent of" he stops to do some quick calculations in his head "42 years of time. Sherlock says that he lives out the entirety of a person's life from inside their own body, but without any ability to cause change or do anything, really. The silent observer, he calls himself, living out a person's entire life in what feels to him to be real time."
"Wait, so, he lives out their entire life without being able to do anything?" The young detective cautiously asked. "That's amazing, but it sounds... horrible. How is it even possible, though?"
The Detective Inspector shrugged. "No one knows, but it sure does explain a lot about Sherlock here, doesn't it? He doesn't do it much anymore, but he used to go in deep a lot more often. How do you think he learned every obscure thing he knows, from science to the entire run of London? How do you think he learned to be such a great observer? Years upon years of being stuck, forced to observe and listen in someone else's life with nothing else to do."
DI Lestrade brought it down to a whisper as he leaned in towards the young detective. "No one knows exactly how many years he's lived, but we have a pool running in case he ever tells one of us. My guess is that it's somewhere over 7,000, but not quite 7,800."
The young detective starred in horror. "Is that why he's so..."
"Patient with people?" DI Lestrade finished. He let out a small snicker, but then a frown quickly settled on his face. "Yeah, that's why. Why he's always on the hunt for excitement, why it seems like he hardly cares about anything. Because when he's in deep living out someone else's life, he describes it as 'inexplicably boring'. Especially the person's childhood, or so I've heard. He's lived for so many years that he's seen almost everything there is to see and met so many people that long ago, he stopped caring about them."
He glanced towards John, who was still standing near Sherlock, checking his watch. The Detective Inspector took back his previous statement. "Most of them, anyways."
They waited around silently for several minutes before the young detective spoke up again. "I've heard that he has a perfect memory. He remembers every detail from all the lives he's lived before?"
DI Lestrade nodded. "Everything" he stated simply.
The young detective nodded, and watched Sherlock sitting calmly on the chair, occasionally twitching a finger or mumbling something that no one could make out. Then she nodded to the Detective Inspector and made her way back to the edge of the crime scene, where she had been standing before, and again tried to shake the mud off of her shoes.
The young detective had just grabbed a bottle of water to take a quick drink when all of a sudden Sherlock jolted once, and again, before springing forward onto the ground. Everyone ran forward to help him, but the young detective stayed on the sidelines to watch.
John was the first one to help him up, taking the blanket off of Holmes's back and sitting him back in the chair. "Hey, Sherlock." He smiled. "You're back now. You made it back."
Sherlock looked confused for a second before shaking his head, probably to clear his mind, and looked to John. A moment later, though, the confident gleam returned to his eye, and he sprang up again, turning to all the detectives who had gathered around him. One of them offered him a bottle of water, and after taking a few long gulps, he started rattling off what he had discovered from reliving Daniel Williams' life.
"It started three years ago, with blackmail against his son and a new government contract in the works. He came here today, hoping to bribe his blackmailers with money and government secrets to leave his family alone. He met a sniper instead, hidden up in that tree over there." He pointed up to the pine tree he had previously observed. "The sniper made off with the folders he had, but not the money. Her employer has no need for money, especially with how much power and influence he already has."
A delightful glee lit up Sherlock's face as his observations came to a close. "Ah, but you'll never guess who the sniper was! It's someone we've all seen today, someone hiding in our very own ranks, probably undercover in the Scotland Yard for her employer."
Sherlock Holmes, master consulting detective, the silent observer, the man who could go in deep, turned to where the young detective had been standing only a few minutes prior, but stood no longer. Where upon knowing that Sherlock would wake up in a few minutes with her cover blown, she slunk off into the woods and disappeared from sight.
Everyone, sans Sherlock, looked shocked as Sherlock announced his final deduction and started for the tree line. "Come on, John, the game is finally back on!" He yelled back as he tore off into the woods.